However, if the
objets
were reassuringly English, the staff most certainly were not. The duty on imports had been lifted, certainly, but there was a proviso: if Silas Whittam was to benefit from the British government’s tax exemptions, he must also hire all his staff from the local population. And none of them, Silas had fast discovered, would cooperate with guests who believed themselves vastly superior to the servant class. It was an unhappy chemistry: the Jamaicans demanded basic courtesy before they’d stir themselves to action, while the English demanded instant service at the most peremptory signal. And any number of interior trappings, be they ever so authentic, could not obscure or remedy the fact that a coddled egg had just taken fifty-four minutes from the moment of ordering to its arrival at the table. Lady Millbank – for it was she who had waited, in a state of mounting disbelief – knew very little about the culinary arts, but she did know that an egg, carefully placed in simmering water, took six minutes to reach perfection. Her brother’s grilled kipper had come quite promptly, and although he had refused to eat it until the egg was brought, Lady Millbank suspected that she had been singled out by the hotel staff for special ill treatment. The waitress, a large elderly woman with a lumbering gait, had taken the order with a palpable lack of interest. There had followed a long period of inactivity, during which Lady Millbank and her brother had quite run out of conversation. Then the kipper arrived, delivered by a boy who appeared to be dressed for school, in grey shorts and socks. The kipper had grown stone cold while a further stretch of time was endured in suffering silence. When the original waitress had finally wandered back into the dining room with Lady Millbank’s breakfast, she had carried the egg on a plate, holding it out at arm’s length as if it were a small bomb. She had placed it rather fiercely on the table and looked Lady Millbank directly in the eye.
‘An egg, missus,’ she had said. ‘That all?’
Really, her insolence was quite threatening.
‘I’m not at all sure that we’re safe in our beds,’ Lady Millbank said to Charles when the waitress was out of earshot. ‘That woman gave me my egg with an attitude of naked loathing.’
Charles laughed, and his sister regarded him icily.
‘Sorry Mildred,’ he said. ‘Bone in the throat.’ He made a short pantomime of expelling the phantom obstruction.
‘How can you laugh, Charles? Is my life of so little importance to you that the idea of my throat being slashed as I sleep is comical?’ Her chin wobbled and her voice cracked.
‘Oh, I say,’ said her brother. ‘Steady on.’
‘Truly, the negroes look daggers at me and I’m quite sure I’ve done nothing to offend.’
Charles considered his options. He could tell his sister the truth, which was that she had not yet herself shown a scrap of courtesy to anyone, for anything; that she was rude, imperious, ungrateful, querulous and universally disliked. Or he could finish his kipper. He tucked in.
In the kitchen, Ruby had finished the breakfast service and was making lunch for the hotel staff. Roscoe had been and gone. Today, Ruby’s shift had started two hours before school, so her boy had come with her and had been put to good use. He had sat at the table folding linen napkins into sailing boats, the way the white boss liked. He had spared Batista’s swollen feet by carrying some of the food through to the diners. He had helped Ruby chop scallions, and had stirred a slick, sharp butter and vinegar sauce that the English poured over their eggs. It looked like yellow grease, he had told his mother: it is, Ruby had said. She kept to hand a great tome of a cookbook, to which she was forced to refer many times a day as she picked her way through the obstacle course of English classics. Roscoe – a reader, even before he started school – liked to open it at random and laugh at the names of the dishes and their ingredients, reading them aloud to the kitchen in the solemn voice of a scholar: jugged hare, bubble-and-squeak, eel pie, plum pudding. Mrs Beeton sounded interesting, Roscoe thought; she added thoughtful, informative notes. This morning he had read about the barberry, a fruit so sour that even birds refuse to eat it.
‘Like the tamarind, Ruby,’ he had said to his mother. ‘Mrs Beeton says so. Listen.’ He adopted his reading voice. ‘“In this respect, it nearly approaches the tamarind. When boiled with sugar it makes a very agreeable preserve.”’
Ruby had smiled at the words. Very agreeable preserve: such elegant English. She had little time or respect for the recipes, which to her were inextricable from the demands of Mr Silas, but she did like the way Mrs Beeton wrote. She wasn’t confident enough of her own skills to read to an audience, but sometimes, if Ruby was alone in the kitchen, she would read aloud as Roscoe did, practising the vowels, memorising the phrases for future use. She found them mysterious and lyrical: ‘The Ayrshire is peculiarly adapted for the dairy. In this, it stands unrivalled’ and ‘the philosophy of frying consists in this, that liquids subjected to the action of fire do not all receive the same quantity of heat’. Marvellous. Marvellous.
But it was later in the day now, and she no longer had need of Mrs Beeton because she was cooking from the heart for her own people. The smells of her childhood filled the room: green bananas, salted mackerel, Scotch Bonnets, coconut milk. She stirred and sang, and let the vapours from the pots envelop her face. The peppers had bite; she breathed in their heat.
‘Girl, that a fine, fine sight.’
Scotty stood at the kitchen door, watching her. She waved her spoon at him.
‘Boiled bananas and mackerel rundown,’ she said. ‘But it won’t be ready a while yet.’
‘I no talkin’ ’bout da food, girl,’ he said, and winked. He smiled at her with his loose, lascivious mouth, and she sucked her teeth at him disapprovingly and turned away.
‘Ah Ruby, why you so hitey-titey? You breakin’ ma heart, girl.’ He walked through the kitchen and over to the range. Ruby cut him a look, the one she reserved exclusively for impertinent men.
‘If you stand there panting and drooling don’t be surprised if I treat you like a dog,’ she said. He roared with laughter and shook his head, as if amazed by her. He was as thick-skinned as a calabash, thought Ruby. There was just no insulting him.
Batista came into the kitchen carrying the last of the crockery from the dining room. On an island where no one seemed to hurry, she was slower than most; she rested from time to time on every journey, whatever its length. She stood now and blew four long breaths, as if she’d run through the hotel to get here. She was padded all over with soft flesh, which in the three years Ruby had known her had swelled and spread, and it was strange, because Ruby had never seen Batista eat. She always declined staff lunch and dinner, and would sit instead with her Bible: feeding her soul, she said.
‘Bakra, ’im want see you,’ she said to Ruby. She meant Silas, whom she held in the deepest contempt. Batista was descended from Maroon warriors; rebellion ran through her veins. When she looked at Silas Whittam she saw a white slave master and untold suffering; the fires of hell were awaiting him.
Scotty whistled, a long, flat note. ‘Cu ya, Little Miss Badness, what you been an’ done now?’
Ruby shrugged.
‘She slow-slow,’ Batista said, moving again. She hauled herself over to the sink with her pile of plates, and dropped them heavily in the sudsy water. ‘Trouble wid an egg, nuh?’ She looked at Ruby and smiled knowingly; a wide, slow smile that fattened her cheeks and closed her eyes. ‘Bakra, ’im waiting in ’is office.’
‘If he wishes to see me, he knows where to find me,’ Ruby said.
‘Good girl.’
Batista puffed and sucked at the air again, in and out, standing with her hands on her huge hips, catching her breath. ‘Mi too bufu-bufu for dis life,’ she said. ‘Mi fit only to sit an’ talk to de Lord.’
Later, Ruby sat beneath the frangipani tree on the road home, her meeting place with Roscoe. Its branches formed a wide, shady parasol and the ground beneath was soft and fragrant with fallen flowers. A hot breeze blew and Ruby pulled the red cotton scarf away from her head and leaned back, letting the tree support her and the canopy of leaves cool her head. Mr Silas, catching her as she left, had been nasty, tearing into her with the language of the docks. She had told him, if he cared so deeply about Lady Millbank’s coddled egg he should prepare it himself. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of the manner in which Lady Millbank had addressed her on more than one occasion. Mr Silas had put his angry face too close to her own and had spoken through bared teeth: ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Ruby Marie Donaldson,’ she had said, ‘as you well know,’ and she had walked away, though he all but screamed for her to come back. Now she let the wind in the leaves and the smell of crushed flowers soothe her agitated spirit. Roscoe would be along soon. She closed her eyes and, presently, she slept.
Seth had rooms at the hotel, a bedroom and a bathroom above his uncle’s office. A private staircase – small and wooden, enclosed by doors top and bottom, like his early childhood home in Netherwood – led from the office directly into Seth’s bedroom. It was an odd arrangement, but he was glad of it. He shouldn’t have liked to descend the guest staircase each morning, placing himself in the line of fire the moment he stepped out of his quarters. Silas’s office, a large, airy room with shuttered windows, was off-limits for hostile guests: like a buffer zone between warring nations, it was a neutral space, free of conflict. Unless his uncle was on the warpath, of course, and by the end of this trying day he was.
‘They play me for a fucking idiot,’ Silas said. He brought his fist down on the desk and every object upon it bounced or rattled. Seth, pink and speechless, nodded.
‘I give them respectable, paid employment, the chance to better their miserable fucking lot, and they repay me with insolence and disrespect. Do you know how my own reputation stands as a result? Do you?’
This was the worst thing about Silas’s rages; he peppered his rants with questions that lay like rabbit traps, waiting to snap at the wrong answer.
‘Compromised, sir?’
It was a worthy effort: frank, yet diplomatic. But the jaws of the trap sprang shut anyway.
‘Compromised?
Compromised?
Do you see or hear anything as you go about your business? Or does your fundamental idiocy preserve you from the harsher facts of life? My reputation on this island is in tatters. My reputation, painstakingly built over years of hard work and investment, has been ground into the dirt by the filthy fucking heels of the savages I am forced to employ by a Colonial Office staffed by fools who sit on their complacent arses, congratulating themselves on solving the Jamaica Problem.’
He flung himself back in his chair, depleted by the torrent of words. Seth shifted uncomfortably on his own seat, wishing himself elsewhere: wishing, too, that Hugh Oliver were here. Hugh, second in command at Whittam & Co., was as calm as Silas was volatile. His presence was a balm. Even the guests were happier when Hugh was on the premises. But he was back in Bristol, where the banana warehouses were and, thought Seth, since he himself didn’t have the excuse of being on the wrong side of the Atlantic, he’d better try to offer a solution. So he ventured a thought that he’d had yesterday evening, when every single one of the diners who had chosen beef en croute had sent it back with the pastry – flaccid, damp, pale – completely untouched.
‘Why don’t you write to Mam,’ he said. ‘She could come over, show them kitchen staff ’ow to go on.’
Silas winced. He had told Seth to lose his Yorkshire accent; it had been all very well when his only prospect had been to follow his late father down a coalmine, but was entirely inappropriate now that he was under Silas’s wing. One day the ships, the bananas and – God help him – the hotel would be his, and yet he still sometimes lapsed, and when he did he sounded like a pit lad with a lamp in his hand and clogs on his feet. However, Silas was interested in the suggestion, and when he spoke he didn’t shout.
‘Good God, Seth, that’s actually not a bad idea.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ To his irritation, he felt himself redden, and he wondered how old he would be before his emotions stopped advertising themselves in his face.
‘It’s a brilliant idea. Eve MacLeod, pastry queen of the North of England, riding to our rescue at the Whittam Hotel.’ He gave a bark of delighted laughter. ‘Evie. Brilliant.’ He looked at Seth. ‘You write the letter, though.’
‘Me?’
‘You. Pull on the maternal heartstrings. My sister can possibly resist me, but she won’t be able to resist you.’
Now it sounded like subterfuge, and Seth felt uncomfortable. He didn’t want to be the lure that brought his mam all the way to Jamaica. He wanted her to come, of course, but only if she knew the truth and thought it a good idea.
‘Don’t worry, Seth,’ said Silas, and for a moment Seth thought his uncle had softened. He hadn’t. ‘I’ll write the letter. All you have to do is copy it out and sign.’
I
t was most out of the ordinary for the cook, the housekeeper and the butler all to be summoned at once to the morning room by the countess, and yet, increasingly, the extraordinary was becoming rather routine. What would actually be extraordinary, grumbled Parkinson to himself, was if nothing extraordinary happened: if one day – just one, that was all he asked – could come and go in a dreary, comfortable, conventional manner. He exaggerated, of course; this was becoming a habit, particularly when his arthritis played up, as it did today, the pain seeping down his left hip towards the thigh from somewhere deep inside the bone. He rubbed it surreptitiously as he climbed the servants’ stairs, following Sarah Pickersgill and Mrs Powell-Hughes. The housekeeper – who was possessed, Parkinson was certain, of a sixth sense – turned and said, ‘I hope you tried my remedies for that, Mr Parkinson. Sooner you do, sooner you’ll find relief.’
‘I have, Mrs Powell-Hughes, I have,’ said the butler, though in fact he hadn’t; the preparation of Epsom salts, cream of tartar and ground rhubarb root was not his idea of a bedtime drink. Nor did he consider it feasible to rub the afflicted joint twice a day with hot vinegar. He took pride in his high standards of personal grooming, and did not wish to go about his duties smelling like a pickled onion. It had been kind of her to think of him, though. Kind of her to take the trouble to grind the root. He winced at the top of the flight of stairs and paused, rubbing again at the place from where the pain seemed to emanate. It really was a drain on the spirits, he thought: like a permanent toothache, but worse, since nothing could be pulled. Then he let the green baize door swing back into place and he followed his colleagues into the morning room, where Lady Netherwood greeted them with characteristic informality. Oddly, she was standing by the window with her arms raised, bending at the waist like a sapling in a strong wind.